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| Hyphens – Yes Or No? |
Hyphens – Yes Or No?
If most of your traffic is going to be coming through search engine click through and links, hyphens or dashes between the words of your domain name; i.e. MyWebBiz.com (No Hyphens) versus My-Web-Biz.com (Hyphens included), if the hyphens are going to help with search engine positioning, are the worth it?
It is also a good idea to include hyphens (-) between each of the keywords within your domain name. This tells a search engine spider that each word is a separate word, not one continuous word. The search engines which use keywords in the domain name as a part of their ranking formula will not be able to recognize keywords unless they are separated by a hyphen (or a slash or underscore for sub-directories). Search Engines prefer the use of hyphens in domain names because they can produce more accurate search results by being able to recognize specified key words in your URL. Keep in mind that a domain with words separated by hyphens will be harder for users to remember (and may also decrease the value of the domain).
However, if keywords are used with hyphens the keywords may be interpreted as such by search engines thereby helping rank a site higher. If at all possible, try to register both forms of the name for example, websitemarketing.com and web-site-marketing.com.
To have a good web site marketing plan, you must realize alphabetical priority of domain names is still used by some search engines as a key factor in their ranking formula.
If most of your traffic is going to be coming through search engine click through and links, hyphens or dashes between the words of your domain name; i.e. MyWebBiz.com (No Hyphens) versus My-Web-Biz.com (Hyphens included), if the hyphens are going to help with search engine positioning, are the worth it?
It is also a good idea to include hyphens (-) between each of the keywords within your domain name. This tells a search engine spider that each word is a separate word, not one continuous word. The search engines which use keywords in the domain name as a part of their ranking formula will not be able to recognize keywords unless they are separated by a hyphen (or a slash or underscore for sub-directories). Search Engines prefer the use of hyphens in domain names because they can produce more accurate search results by being able to recognize specified key words in your URL. Keep in mind that a domain with words separated by hyphens will be harder for users to remember (and may also decrease the value of the domain).
However, if keywords are used with hyphens the keywords may be interpreted as such by search engines thereby helping rank a site higher. If at all possible, try to register both forms of the name for example, websitemarketing.com and web-site-marketing.com.
To have a good web site marketing plan, you must realize alphabetical priority of domain names is still used by some search engines as a key factor in their ranking formula.
